It was deep in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia that “Babies on Board” was etched in dirt across the back of the truck window, but not for babies in the traditional sense. The truck had more than a hundred baby hellbenders – 117 to be exact – carefully stowed and ready for release into their native habitats.

After driving for around two hours from Blacksburg, Virginia, the team – comprised of Bill Hopkins, two Virginia Department of Wildlife Resource biologists and a research technician – prepared the new hellbender salamanders for release. 

Each container held water from the original nesting sites, helping the young hellbenders adjust before release.

Using a barrier to slow the current, the team lowered the hellbenders into a specially designed temporary shelter that lets young hellbenders leave on their own accord while keeping predators out. 

With everything in place, the team carefully lowered the babies into their new home.

Hopkins had been waiting for this for his entire career: the first-ever release of baby hellbenders into Virginia streams. 

“It’s an important milestone,” Hopkins said. “We released baby hellbenders into the wild for the first time. It was a special moment. When we opened the containers, the young salamanders swam off and found shelter among the rocks. After nearly 20 years of research, that moment was incredibly meaningful.”

A unique species

Few species are as unusual as the hellbender. What makes them unique is that they breathe primarily through their skin.

“For an animal of their size, that’s very unusual,” Hopkins said. “You can think of it as having their lungs on the outside of their body, which makes them highly vulnerable to changes in water chemistry. Because of this, we study them as a sentinel species. They can tell us when water quality has been compromised.” 

Hellbenders are habitat specialists, meaning they require very specific environmental conditions to survive. They thrive in cool, well-oxygenated, clean streams with large boulders for shelter.

Appalachia remains one of their last strongholds because some of that habitat is still intact. Hellbenders were found across 15 states, from Missouri to New York and down to northern Alabama and Georgia. Recently, they’ve been eliminated from hundreds of streams and are declining rapidly.

Research over the past several decades has made it clear that water quality is the primary driver of their decline.  

“When we introduce sediment, pollutants, or chemicals into streams, it directly impacts hellbenders,” Hopkins said. “Because they rely on their skin for respiration, even small changes in water quality can have serious consequences.”

Rearing the young

Male hellbenders guard and care for their eggs and young for up to eight months, which is an exceptionally long time for species. This care is critical for the survival of the offspring. However, in degraded environments, the researchers are seeing that males are not successfully caring for their young.

In degraded streams, nest failure rates exceed 85 percent, while in higher quality-streams, the failure rate is around 50 percent. Sustained failure rates that continue to be or exceed 85 percent year after year are high enough to cause population declines and eventual extinctions of those populations.  

“To address this, we’ve developed a conservation strategy called ‘head-starting,’” Hopkins said. “We collect eggs from nests that are inevitably going to fail, raise them in a controlled environment until they become juveniles, and then release them back into their native streams. The goal is to stabilize populations that are on the brink of extinction while habitat restoration efforts, such as improving stream banks and protecting riparian zones, take place.”

The program is a collaboration between Virginia Tech and the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources. In fact, two alumni from the College of Natural Resources and Environment that are now biologists with the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources are specifically assigned to this project: Austin Holloway ’23, M.S. ’25 and Luke Wess ’25, combining applied wildlife management with active research. 

“This work is a true collaboration between research and conservation,” said Holloway, who worked in Hopkins’ lab during his undergraduate degree at Virginia Tech. “We’re actively trying to ensure hellbenders’ survival while improving the ecosystems on which they depend.”

The team chose the hellbender baby release sites based off multiple years of data. Shelters were selected that had been used by hellbenders in the past, maintained good water flow, and did not accumulate sediment. 

In the pilot year of the program, 117 hellbenders were released. In the future, the research team hopes to release more than six times that amount.

“Looking ahead, our goal is to scale up these efforts and release thousands of juveniles each year to help prevent population collapse,” Hopkins said. 

In a follow-up visit about two weeks after release, all 117 individuals had left the shelters.

“That’s actually a really good sign,” Holloway said. “It means the design worked and they were able to disperse naturally.” 

An Appalachian wonder

The mountains of Southwest Virginia in central and southern Appalachia are among the most biodiverse temperate ecosystems in the world. 

Plants, fish, crayfish, mussels, and salamanders are among this biodiversity. There are more species of salamanders here than anywhere else on the planet, including the Eastern Hellbender. 

“Like cheetahs in the Serengeti or pandas in China, hellbenders are symbolic of this region,” Hopkins said. “They represent the biodiversity, culture, and heritage of Appalachia. If we lose them, we’re losing part of our identity, and it signals that our water quality has been seriously degraded.”

Hellbenders play a vital role in freshwater ecosystems. They are key predators that help regulate crayfish populations, and their young serve as food for other species. More broadly, they are indicators of environmental health. If hellbenders are thriving, it means the water is clean – and not just for wildlife, but for people as well. 

Locals said that decades ago, they saw hellbenders regularly in streams where they’ve now disappeared.

“Our hope is that through research, conservation, applied management, and restoration efforts, future generations will once again have the chance to encounter this remarkable species in the wild,” Hopkins said. 

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